


The Faraway Suicides

by SheerSaxifrage



Category: OMORI (Video Game)
Genre: ... sort of, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, M/M, Suicide, Suicide Pacts, as well as elements of maybe magic maybe mundane, it's for you to decide really, mental illness abounds, our kids are a little off here, suicide baiting, suicide romanticization, tw suicide, tw suicide baiting, tw suicide pacts, tw suicide romanticization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:34:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29974683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SheerSaxifrage/pseuds/SheerSaxifrage
Summary: No one could remember whose idea it was, or if there was ever a time before they knew they would eventually be killing themselves. Aubrey and Kel wanted to do it as soon as possible, all of them in the treehouse at once; but Hero forbid it, said the gate was only wide enough for one at a time. Mari agreed. They were the leaders, so that was that.(The gang agrees to die together.)
Relationships: Basil/Sunny (OMORI), Hero/Mari (OMORI)
Comments: 39
Kudos: 85





	The Faraway Suicides

**Author's Note:**

> Well fuck me, friends. Omori actually ran me over with his car. Motherfucker didn't even look back.
> 
> As I was playing, I more than once had to pause and say to myself, _this is so good_. And I'm not a letsplayer, okay? I was speaking to no one. You know the shit fucking slaps when it has you talking to yourself.
> 
> And yeah yeah I got the good ending first, but the fact that the good ending is an outlier is tragic within itself. Half the friendship group can easily die via staged suicide or actual suicide, when I realized that, well... my brain jumped to HEY what if Aubrey, Hero, and Kel killed themselves, too?
> 
> As the title and subject matter suggest, this is loosely inspired by The Virgin Suicides.
> 
>  **TW** for suicide pacts. **TW** for suicide baiting. **TW** for suicide romanticization. This story revolves around these themes, and there is no happy ending here. If that's at all triggering for you please DO NOT read this fic. Remember, you're life is important, and the world is a vastly better place with you in it.
> 
> ...and even if you don't find it triggering, this is still very much a case of dead dove: do not eat. You've been warned.

Hero warned her two stories wouldn’t be high enough.

She wouldn’t listen. _Bodies are super fragile,_ Mari said with her infectious smile. _If a fall down the stairs can kill me, I’m sure jumping off the roof can, too!_ She set another plate of cookies in front of them—made from scratch, with all her love. The kids decided not to worry, because when Mari said something, they believed it.

She wound up landing on her knees, crushing them between the impact and the weight of her own body. Doctors told her it would be a minimum of six months healing, and a miracle if she ever walked again without assistance. Seeing her that way made Sunny cry, made them all cry. This wasn’t supposed to have happened.

She was made to go to therapy, physical and psychological, and at the latter she made sure to feign regret. But late most evenings she would gather with them in the backyard, where they’d whisper for hours about their grand return.

No one could remember whose idea it was, or if there was ever a time before they knew they would eventually be killing themselves. Aubrey and Kel wanted to do it as soon as possible, all of them in the treehouse at once; but Hero forbid it, said the gate was only wide enough for one at a time. Mari agreed. They were the leaders, so that was that.

There came a point when Mari’s recovery stalled and Sunny thought he might need to assist her—but, she insisted she’d be fine. Her release, her turning and returning, was an inevitability; a set of shattered knees could hardly stop the wheel of destiny.

And it didn’t. A year and a month after her first attempt Mari tried again, this time hanging herself from a low-sitting branch in their backyard. Sunny was the one who found her, who saw that she died with her eyes wide open, black hair curtaining her face such that only one eye was visible. He loved it. He loved her. Her death enveloped him like a warm blanket even as their mother collapsed screaming; even during the memorial service held in the town square; even after her funeral and everything that came after. Her glare followed him slowly behind, watching over him all the days and nights of his life.

Something to look forward to. 

* * *

They were _all_ made to go to therapy this time—Sunny and Hero, of course, but the rest as well. They had all been close to Mari; utter devastation was expected from all of them.

Kel did the worst possible thing by insisting he was fine—that was labeled as denial, of course. Hero played it smarter. He locked himself away, lost a year of school, starved off fifty pounds. He made sure to cry hard at least once a week, loud enough for their parents to hear. He made a grand show of claiming he’d never love anyone again. He played the role of the shattered boyfriend so thoroughly Kel sometimes worried it wasn’t an act; but then the rest of their friends would come visit, and he’d be all smiles again, and he’d ask Sunny to describe what Mari’s hanging corpse looked like for the millionth time.

Sunny often sketched where they all came from, and Hero loved his drawings so much Sunny wound up giving him quite a few. Hero covered his side of the room with them: images of a wrecked playground, a mandala with Mari’s face in the center, asphyxiated bodies caught in Pluto’s orbit, broken limbs that stretched out for miles. He’d stare at them all night, dreaming of the day he’d languish beneath the light of the eternal again. But not yet. All in its time.

He felt bad, in a distant sort of way, for Mari and Sunny’s parents. They were innocent people, and seeing their daughter that way must have been a shock to them. This was why Hero—after making up his lost year and getting into one of the country’s best universities—blew his brains out in his college dorm. He left the wreckage for his roommate to find (revenge for trying to set him up on a date, as if he had eyes for anyone but Mari), and shot himself at an angle sure to destroy his face. He reasoned that if his parents could not recognize him, they would be spared the trauma of knowing he died by his own hand.

The night Hero died, Kel dreamt it. He saw the top of Hero’s head explode, the exact moment his eyes dimmed and went from aligned to walled, veering off in independent directions right before popping. The vision startled him awake but he held on to the image like a spider to its prey, wrapping the memory in silk threads and devouring it over and over again. He never would have imagined Hero would bless him in the same way Mari blessed Sunny. And from so far away, too! Hero really was the best brother he could ask for.

The call came just as the sun was rising—Kel knew it by the sound of their mother’s shrieking. _You did it, you crazy son of a bitch. You really did it._

* * *

At Hero’s funeral, his mother stole the show, throwing herself on his closed casket and begging god to take her with him.

Aubrey had to try very hard not to laugh. It wasn’t the woman’s grief she found funny, it was the idea that any god would grant such a foolish request. She would need to take matters into her own hands if she truly wanted to see her son again, though the chance she’d recognize him was near nonexistent.

Kel thought it was only right he be next, but Aubrey insisted it be her. It was closing in on three years since Mari died, Aubrey missed her, and her life was going nowhere fast, anyway. And didn’t he have a basketball championship coming up? Wasn’t he taking Cris to prom? He ought to busy himself with those earthly matters while he waited his turn.

Like a good big sister, Mari came to Sunny that very night. She stood behind him in the bathroom mirror, skin greying, eyes hollow, mouth a gaping maw of despair; it did Sunny’s heart good to see the beyond was treating her well. He blinked once and she was gone, a polaroid left in her place.

_Aubrey._

She was _so_ happy, though part of her was a bit annoyed at Hero for shooting himself—that’s the way _she_ had wanted to go, but she couldn’t do that now without looking like a copycat. What was left? She didn’t want to try something with a high failure rate, like an overdose or wrist-slitting; Mari had already proven how devastating a failed attempt could be. But then she read about how Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and walked into a river, and Aubrey thought that was _brilliant._ She liked to imagine how nice hanging must have felt for Mari, and just _knew_ drowning had to be a close second.

She decided not to tell the boys when or how she would go, and her last day on earth was spent rather uneventfully at Basil’s house. He showed them his sprouting lavender, she helped Sunny with his trig homework, and Kel ate a gallon of ice cream and threw up. She left before the rest of them, waved goodbye one last time, and set off for the park.

The police found her bloated body a week later, floating at the top of the lake. Basil cried hard when they got the news—he wished she would have told them where to find her, he had _so_ wanted to be the one to discover her body. Every uncovered detail was a gift to them all: the rocks in her pockets, her pink dye having washed out, the zip ties she used to bind her own hands and feet together, the note she left stapled to a nearby tree.

_SEE YOU LATER, SUCKERS—LOVE MARI, HERO, AND AUBREY._

* * *

Aubrey’s mother chose to cremate her and quietly left town a month later.

It was after that note that the town began to suspect that maybe, _perhaps,_ there was something off about their little group. They were classified as “high risk” for losing so many people in their orbit to suicide, were made to go to therapy three times a week, and were discouraged from seeing one another unsupervised. Sunny reminded Kel and Basil that this was to be expected, that the pact was still in effect even if their families dragged them to different corners of the globe. Basil understood, but the crackdown frustrated Kel. When word came down that he should die next, he got right on it.

His parents refused to get him a car, but he knew where the keys to theirs were. In the middle of the night he got in, turned on the engine, rolled up the windows, and decided to just sleep it out—but he was only there for five minutes before his father caught him. He’d heard Kel get up and _something_ told him to check on his only remaining son. He held Kel to his chest and sobbed big, ugly tears, begging his son not to kill himself. _We already lost Hero, we can’t lose you, too._

An ambulance was called, and he was institutionalized for a week following the attempt. His parents pulled him from school and refused to entertain any talk about college. He was to stay home until he was well again.

 _You have rope down in the basement, knives in the kitchen, and a medicine cabinet full of pills,_ Sunny texted him on an encrypted app when Kel finally got his phone back. _Even if they tie you to a chair, you can still bite your tongue off. They will never win._

Sunny could have suggested dozens of different ways for Kel to kill himself, but what he ultimately did was so delightful Sunny just _knew_ he got it from a cartoon. Kel got in his bathtub, plugged in his mother’s hairdryer, set it on high, and dropped it into the water. All the lights in the house went out and then on again in an instant; it took Kel a full minute to die, electricity still pumping through his body when his father found him.

* * *

Sunny wasn’t allowed to go to Kel’s funeral. When Basil tried, Kel’s mother grabbed him by the scruff and demanded to know why her sons killed themselves.

It happened right there in the chapel, Kel’s open casket a few feet away. “You broke my family,” she rasped through her tears. It took four people to pry her off of Basil. _“You ruined my life!”_

Behind her, if anyone cared to look, Kel was smirking.

* * *

_That’s a shame,_ Sunny texted when Basil recounted the incident later that night.

 _I feel bad for her,_ Basil replied. _If she knew where Kel was going, she would have thanked me. She’d have thrown a party, not a funeral._

Sunny wasn’t so sure. His mom once found one of his sketchbooks, and she found it so disturbing that his father burned it. 

He didn’t want to die until his grandmother did, which they always took to mean that he would be last. But then she _did_ die, quite suddenly in her sleep. Then it became anyone’s game, but it still shocked Basil when Mari came to _him_ , curling her decrepit finger foreword.

Basil shook his head no. He could think of no worse fate than being alone; he couldn’t do that to Sunny. But Mari always got what she wanted—Sunny made sure of it.

Basil had been expecting Sunny to be angry when he called instead of texted, but all his best friend wanted was to meet him at the park later. They went to where Aubrey drowned herself, Sunny rolling his eyes at the memorial plaque the town erected in her honor. They sat at the edge of the lake, fingers intertwined as Sunny stared up at the swaying leaves and the stars above.

"I-I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have refused, but—”

Sunny waved him off, still facing the sky. Everything about him was so _perfect_ —from the shape of his head to the way his hair fell, to his sallow skin and willow bones. Basil still sometimes felt the urge to kiss his feet, as he would often do when Sunny used to sit on his throne made of severed hands. He wanted to declare his love right then, as he had a thousand times before, prior to their displacement. “Did I ever tell you about White Space?”

That was new. “No. What’s that?”

"It was my own secret place. I would go there whenever I felt stressed out.”

Hearing that broke Basil’s heart. When had Sunny ever felt stressed out? Had Basil known, he would have absorbed every last burden Sunny felt into his own body, whittled his troubles down to nails to be driven into his hands and feet for the sake of his beloved.

"It was great there,” he went on. “Nothing but me, my sketchbook, my tissues, and Mewo. I created entire galaxies with the stroke of my pen there. I sometimes wonder if they still exist, or if they collapsed beneath the weight of my absence.”

"What you made can never be destroyed.”

The corner of Sunny’s lips twitched up, then settled back down. “What I’m trying to say is, you don’t need to worry. I’m used to being alone.”

Sunny had always been able to see right through him. “That’s so admirable. Just when I start thinking I know everything about you, you reveal something new.”

He turned to face Basil, holding his gaze. “I can say the same for you. Since when have you gotten so attached to this place? We let waiting for your grandmother slide, but now you want to wait for _me?_ Who’s next, Polly? Gino? The Maverick?” He scoffed. “There are billions of people in this world, you can’t possibly wait to outlive them all.”

Basil plucked out a blade of grass. “Y-yeah, I guess y-you’re right…”

"Can you do me a favor?” Sunny turned bodily towards Basil, face an inch away from his. “Plant a garden for us. The first thing I want to do when I ascend is walk through it with you.”

"Okay,” he said, face growing warm. Anything for his beloved.

Sunny kissed him—chaste, close-mouthed, because that’s how things worked in Faraway Town. “You’ll need to go on ahead of me if you want them to be in bloom by the time I get there.”

Basil nodded, eyes clouding over. Sunny was right. Sunny was always right.

Sunny snuggled up next to him, nuzzling his cheek. “I look forward to receiving the news of your death. It’ll be interesting to see the effect it has on this town, and how many hands try to stop _me_ from going over the edge. These people are determined… but so are we.”

* * *

Of course Basil did the dramatic thing and slit his wrists. Sunny was impressed. That method had a high failure rate, so he must have cut very deep.

His parents, finally and at long last, asked him if their group had made a suicide pact. Mari was a tragedy, Hero was collateral, Aubrey could be chalked up to coincidence—but _Kel?_ And now Basil? The lot of them had no other friends besides each other. Sunny was the only one left.

When he wouldn’t confirm or deny their accusations, Sunny’s mother fell to her knees. She crawled over to him, red face tight with panic, and sobbed into his lap. _“Please,”_ she whimpered, again and again.

His father loomed above, staring daggers at him. “Look at what you’ve done. You’re going to kill your mother.”

She shouted at her husband to _shut your mouth, this isn’t Sunny’s fault,_ but the old man was closer to the truth than either of them would ever know.

* * *

Unlike the rest of them, he decided not to rush. He wanted to see if anything would truly change in Faraway—and besides, Basil’s garden still needed time to bloom. (He wondered what Basil planted—marigold? oleander? hydrangea?)

He never left home, but lurked on social media enough to know what was going on. The middle school and high school both implemented suicide prevention programs, mandatory for all students to attend. Many parents didn’t let their kids go out after school or on the weekends anymore, dragging them to church service instead. Anyone seen as too morose, too introverted, was immediately labeled as at-risk; interventions were held on accusations alone. There were rumors that their local priest was performing exorcisms on rebellious teens. There was talk of demolishing Basil’s old house and building a center to hold at-risk youth, the conditions of which wouldn’t be dissimilar to juvenile hall.

Backlash was swift. Kim ran away from home. The Maverick got Bebe pregnant and skipped town. Vance beat a homeless man within an inch of his life. Angel set fire to Gino’s Pizzeria after a confrontation with the owner. Charlie got high on angel dust and crashed his car into the Fix-It Shop. Cris took a hammer to her stepfather’s head while he slept.

There was no way such an overblown reaction didn’t predate him and his friends by several generations, and as far as Sunny was concerned, every single resident of Faraway Town ought to thank them for exposing their Black Space so thoroughly. Nothing could change if it wasn’t faced head-on; it was a lesson Sunny had had to learn himself, a thousand times over.

* * *

A year after Basil’s death, Sunny decided he would outdo Mari in the only way he knew how.

He went up to their old treehouse—their most precious space, where they kept all their dreams. He was going up there to grab their old set of cards, and he made sure his parents knew that—so they wouldn’t suspect anything was off when he tripped and tumbled out, hard on his side. His father didn’t want to waste gas getting him to the hospital, but his mother insisted. Beautiful, wonderful mommy. When it was her time, Sunny vowed he'd be the bridge she took to get to the other side.

* * *

Three fractured ribs—no problem. They wouldn’t be bothering him for long.

The doctors recommended he stay the night, and his mother resolved to stay with him. It was a hassle tip-toeing around her, dodging the night staff on his way to the roof. The sky was clear and starless, moon void of course. A most perfect night to say goodbye.

In the end, there were no hands to stop him from going over the edge—only the inevitability of open-air meeting hard earth and the end of his time in this world, crushed beneath the wheel of destiny.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are my life jam. They revive and sustain me through these trying times.


End file.
